


Killing the Groundhog: A Controlled Outcome

by x_los



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-21
Updated: 2008-02-21
Packaged: 2017-11-17 12:09:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Master does not enjoy time paradoxes, Jo's opinions on fashion, Agatha Christie's later works or the Doctor's proclivity to resort to date-rape drugs to get out of talking about their past. In which the Master <i>does</i> enjoy pungee pits, Pimm's Cups and winning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Killing the Groundhog: A Controlled Outcome

Title:  Killing the Groundhog: A Controlled Outcome

Author: [](http://x-los.livejournal.com/profile)[**x_los**](http://x-los.livejournal.com/)       

Rating: PG

Pairing: Three/Delgado!Master

Summary: In which the Master does not enjoy time paradoxes, Jo's opinions on fashion, Agatha Christie's later works or the Doctor's proclivity to resort to date-rape drugs to get out of talking about their past. In which the Master _does_ enjoy pungee pits, Pimm's Cups and winning.

Betas: None. *boggles* Though I was inspired a bit by [](http://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/profile)[**rionaleonhart**](http://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/)'s _Groundhog Day_ -esque _Supernatural_ ficlet.

 

 

Killing the Groundhog: A Controlled Outcome

 

 

 

The morning after yet another unsuccessful ploy for universal domination was foiled by his foppish arch-rival, the Master realized he was trapped in a time loop.

The Master, who had always prided himself on his adaptability, saw only opportunity. He made small alterations to his plan, fixed the tiny mistakes and little accidents of causality that had made all the difference. Some days he won. Some days the Doctor did. Neither outcome finished off the loop. The Master lost interest in his scheme de jour. The Doctor could have the planet, for now at least, he just wanted to be done with this. Having spent a week sulking around the UNIT base laying elaborate traps that disappeared the next day, the Master began to be seriously concerned.

He’d thought it was a Biadkin Loop, which happened sometimes with older model TARDISes like the Doctor's. Their over-grown sentiences sensed other portals to the Time Vortex in their vicinity and glommed onto their networks with all the finesse of a hormonal teenager trying to seduce his drugged prom date. It was a little psychically embarrassing, honestly. The Master thought that if he successfully deactivated both TARDISes the paradox would collapse and everything would revert to form.

He shut both vessels down, going through the elaborate complete procedures to do so rather than risk botching the job and having to do it twice. As an extra, some might say obsessively perfectionist precaution he took the ignition nuclei from both of them before he finished.

With the vital components clutched in his hands, the Master sat in the Doctor’s empty laboratory (the Doctor was off chasing some rather radioactive moles the Master had created that morning to amuse himself) and watched the hand of the wall clock roll past twelve midnight, and creep on, but the little indicator of the date in the center of the face remain stubbornly fixed on February 2nd. It felt like his blood slowed, hardened like treacle, snapped, and re-coagulated wrong.

 

 

***

 

 

                It didn’t seem to matter if he went to sleep. With an air of good sportsmanship he pressed his face into his pillow in the comfortable bedroom of his TARDIS. He didn’t sleep all that often, but it seemed like the thing to do, and it had been known to work in circumstances where the loop was the result of a problem with perceived time: pass into unconsciousness and the time eddy would smooth out around you.

                He woke up to another February second. Getting really annoyed now, he tried to pass the night in a nice hotel, far from the time field influences of his ship. He didn’t need the copy of the Times under the door in the morning to tell him what day it was. His biology was firm on the point. Or rather wobbly, as being constantly out of phase was starting to make him a bit nauseous.

                He wasn’t stupid enough to try to pilot a TARDIS through a paradox. She would have to be in a state of extreme temporal grace for him to stand a chance of surviving that, and he hadn’t had any luck seducing or tricking her into it.

                Getting himself chased into her by a gun-wielding Yates, whose mother he’d just insulted in the most offensive-to-humans terms he could think of (Did humans in this region and period still get upset over the suggestion their mothers had testes? In a few centuries or so male generative organs would be as unremarkable a cosmetic accessory as dangly earrings. So hard to keep these things straight.), had only prompted her to shut the door in Yates’s face and zap the soldier with low voltage current when he pounded on her panels.

                His TARDIS was a proud thing, with a character shaped by centuries of being psychically linked to the Master, who had more personality than most small countries. She didn't take kindly to the prospect of being scuffed by a primitive biped. And for all the Master's efforts she’d just made a sort of mechanical wheeze that the Master thought sounded like suspiciously like a chortle. He didn’t trust that.

                The Master was going to have to resort to something unpleasant.

***

 

The Master snuck into the Doctor’s lab. He waited until Miss Grant was done giving her soliloquy on the state of her relations with Captain Yates, rolling his eyes as the Doctor dispensed some terrible dating advice _(‘Just ask him to the staff dance, there’s a girl’_ indeed—the Doctor had no subtlety). Though given the barrenness of the Doctor’s current romantic life it really shouldn’t have surprised him. The Master brushed dust off his coat, with strokes more vigorous than was necessary. Served him right, the stubborn little—

“You can come out now. Unless you’re hoping that Jo will come back and you too can profit from her insights into the Chanel Spring Line.” The Doctor poked his head into the alcove under the stairs where the Master was sitting against the wall, with his long legs bent at the knees. “Don’t tell anyone, but I hear the Easter suits are going to be aubergine. Imagine the scandal,” he deadpanned.

“She does go on,” the Master conceded, holding out a hand for the Doctor to help him up. The Doctor gave the hand an amused look.

“Much as I like telepathic invasion, I’ll pass.”The Master rolled his eyes and scrambled up himself with rather less dignity than he might have liked.

“May I ask how did you knew I'd come calling?” The Master had liked that hiding place. It was convenient. He’d even left a cushion behind during the Autons affair. A shame to lose it.

“Well,” the Doctor scratched his head, “your hastily stifled chuckle when Jo said she wasn’t barmy enough to invest her latest chunk of inheritance in the new personal computing technology that premiered at the intelligence conference because she thought there was no market for it could have been more hastily stifled.”

“Fair enough, I suppose.” The Master waited for the Doctor’s inexorable question. Or more a demand that he leave with a question mark unhappily fixed at the end like a dog tethered on a short leash. Three, two, one--

“What are you doing here? Besides an ill-conceived Harry Potter performance art piece?” That was actually less irate than usual. Still the Master winced at the reference.

"You're being anachronistic, Doctor. It's gauche."

                "Are you intending to conquer me over the finer points of Time Lord etiquette?" The Doctor's tone made tone words prick strangely. "And you've not answered my question."

                “In your lab? I think it’s been established that I’m learning secrets about the finest fashion house in Europe and Yates’s failure to call back in a timely manner, as well as his ‘cold telephone personality.’ Nothing in the Matrix could possibly have prepared me for these intellectual raptures.”

                The Doctor’s eyes twinkled in a way that seemed very familiar. The Master shifted a bit, realizing that he was making overly flirtatious conversation with the Doctor to diffuse the tension draped between them thick as cloth. And standing very close to a man who had made it clear in the primitive city on Uxarieus that he wanted nothing to do with him. Oh, how the Master _longed_ to be reminded of that humiliating rejection. He cursed inwardly and disguised his step backwards as stretching, easing the cramps from his awkward position. He leaned against the lab table with a feline dignity that implied he was precisely where he wanted to be.

                “I did rather mean on Earth.” The Doctor stepped closer, not menacing or invading, but reestablishing the short distance between them. Pinned against the table, there was no space to casually retreat to escape the Doctor's heady nearness. “What are you doing on _Earth,_ Master?”

                “Oh don’t be coy,” he snapped, unwilling to let the soft tone his name had been spoken in distract him, “As if I've any other option. Obviously you can feel the time loop, and you’ve made no successful effort to disable it. It’s not a Biadkin, and I’ve ruled out the major cognitive experiential paradoxes. Suggestions?” he demanded, eyes narrowing.

                “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re on about,” the Doctor said, arching an eyebrow. “Are you ill? As you’re not currently trying to kill anyone I think I can manage a calming cup of tea. As long as Yates hasn’t been using my beakers to mix his atrocious army cocoa in again, that is. The tea always tastes off after.”

                “Are you seriously going to pretend you can’t feel the paradox?” the Master seethed. “The Time Lord High Council couldn’t have damaged you to that degree without stripping the Rassilon Imperatur from your blood, and they didn’t, so you’ve no excuse for idiocy.”

                “Riffling through my bio-data and legal history, are we?” the Doctor arched an eyebrow, looking over his shoulder, having proceeded to the deep lab sink to wash out two mugs. “Find any interesting developments? Anything you might have missed out on?”

                The Master wondered if that was supposed to sting. Then he wondered if it succeeded. Then he told himself to pay more attention to the conversation he was having than the conversation he half wanted, half dreaded, and caught the Doctor accusing him, without vitriol, of making this entire ‘loop’ notion up.

                “Yes, that’s my great plan, fool you into thinking I’m senile and then spring out and come at you with a burlap sack, incapacitating you entirely. If you’re going to be useless I’m off to try and get us out of this. You can thank me on behalf of your precious favorite planet at your convenience.”

“I’ll thank you if you manage it. You realize that a paradox for you might not be repetitious for me if I was caught outside of the inciting incident? Even a Time Lord can, if rarely, be embroiled in that. For you it’s a paradox, perhaps. For me every day is original,” the Doctor poured water into the mugs from the beaker-kettle, lace dripping out of velvet sheathing the line of his pale wrist, as elegant as the inclined neck of a bird. They were silent while the tea brewed, and the Master's gaze rested comfortable on the Doctor, who swirled a spoon around the mug to encourage the leaves to give themselves to the water, just a bit more.

The Doctor had the same tendency to raise and lower the kettle as he poured that he’d had in his first body, when he’d made them tea every morning. The Master had a bad habit back then of sprinting to whatever class he was late for, leaving his cup to cool on the counter most days, remembering to grab it and suck it down on the way only when he was less rushed. But regardless of his negligence, every morning it waited: milk, no sugar, and steeped a very long time.

                The Doctor made tea differently somehow. The Master had ordered it every morning he’d spent on Earth, exactly as the Doctor served it to him, and it wasn’t quite right. Watching him, the Master remembered that because the Doctor took, had always taken, his tea with sugar. He used the same spoon to stir both mugs, dipping the wet spoon back into the sugar bowl to adjust his own drink. The Doctor rapped it against his cup’s rim and dumped the sugar in, and then swirled the encrusted utensil through the Master’s tea. The slight cusp of sugar clinging to the wet spoon made the difference between perfection and unpalatability. So, the Master thought, he didn’t like his tea without sugar after all. He’d been ordering it all wrong.

“Look for some trigger event that occurred to you while we were in different places on the initial day of the paradox. I don’t exactly believe you, but as I feel fine, and you look worse for the wear, it might be true. Nothing in this has the makings of one of your plots. You'd not rely on me unless you had no other option.”

The Master grunted noncommittally. If the Doctor was naive enough to chalk the Master's insistence that the Doctor abet his schemes up to situational necessity, he'd not be the one to disabuse him of the notion.The theory sounded logical enough, and other Time Lord had no reason to lie about it. The Doctor had a variety of deceptions and evasions at his command, but withholding vital scientific information to be petulant hadn’t ever been in his repertoire. He liked to show off his intelligence too much.

“Or if it’s one of the rarer subjective paradoxes, Rassilon only knows what you’ll have to do to get out of it. Most of those involve coming to mental equilibrium.” The Doctor sipped his tea and gestured to the other cup. “Good luck on that score. Are you going to drink this or is it one of your no-tea days?”

The Master was an inch away before the Doctor could grasp that he’d moved. The Doctor’s eyes went wide, he smacked a hip on the table in a startled effort to scoot back, and a bit of tea sloshed from his mug to the concrete floor with an audible splat.

“I don’t want tea,” the Master hissed, and instead of the emphasis being on want as he’d intended it landed on tea and he felt humiliation curling up in him like a small, dying animal and he had to turn and walk out before the day could deteriorate any further. Only the thought that the Doctor wouldn’t remember the Master staring at him like a milksop _(again)_ while the tea brewed in the morning stopped him from slitting his noxious cabby’s throat out of sheer annoyance with himself. Those bright eyes had welled with a pity for his (obvious, always too obvious) distress, more nauseating than the paradox could hope to compete with.

 

 

***

 

At 12:01 AM on February 2nd the Master ripped a hole in spacetime. At 12:27 he stood beside a heap of charred chronovores he’d killed, channeling the Time Vortex through his TARDIS like she was a lightening rod. She was none to happy about this gratuitous abuse of her capabilities to pull dangerous stunts. Fine. He wasn’t well pleased himself. Time continued to move _wrong._ He had a feeling tomorrow’s date would be distinctly non-linear.

It clearly wasn’t a sup-prime circular effect, then.

Which had really, outside of the Doctor’s suggestions, been his last hypothesis.

 

 

***

 

 

The Doctor caught the Master digging a pungee pit outside the window of his lab.

“Why the devil are you engaging in partisan warfare?” the Doctor asked as the Master patiently used a laser lathe to slice clean edges on the pit, having zapped the dirt that had previously occupied the gaping hole out of existence. He'd made accompanying floor spikes out of what looked a lot like teeth. Whose teeth was unclear, but from the look of their jutting lengths they obviously belonged to something big and threatening. “Don’t you have more advanced weaponry?”

“Oh I’ve managed to obtain codes for a majority of this planet’s nuclear armaments. It’s amazing what people leave just lying about their highly guarded military facilities. I could blow up UNIT so many times over that the grandchildren of people currently in Nottinghamshire would still be getting radiation sickness and have a variety of diverting genetic issues. I’ve wondered if the death of another Time Lord would be enough to ‘break the cycle,’ as it were.”

The Doctor’s eyes narrowed. He looked a bit tired. “And what was your conclusion?”

“That it would be a shame to waste your life in an attempt to escape a plot device that can be foiled by the protagonist of an early nineties romantic comedy.”

“Anything Bill Murray can do, you can do better?”

“Why Doctor,” the Master grinned cheerily up at him, having hunched down to scatter a few more teeth-spikes across the floor, “I didn’t know you had such confidence in me.”

“What’s all this in aid of, then?” the Doctor nodded sharply to the suddenly very Contemporary-Vietnamese patch of the very British long, green lawn, wondering how UNIT hadn’t noticed and chased him off before noticing that the Master’s edges were looking a little blurry. Ah. Perception filter. And the Doctor could see the Master because he wanted to see him. And the Master knew that, and was probably, based off the Doctor's not inconsiderable centuries of experience of the man, not going to let it drop without milking it bone dry. Lovely.

“You know how you hate Conversations.” The Master appropriated the Doctor’s traditional finger quotes, used when mocking the sort of couples who Talked About Their Issues, for the occasion.

“I’m aware, yes.”

“Well, in pursuit of the previously mentioned ‘mental equilibrium’-- and don’t worry, you won’t remember it, don’t go straining your poor, hobbled brain trying—we’re going to have a congenial discussion.”

“And the pit facilitates discourse how?”

“Well the idea was that I would finish up here, sneak in my usual way and if you tried to make a break for it via the window I could point out how very unwise that would be.” The Master, who would have been an obscenely good Boy Scout, was grinning, obviously happy with his complex and deadly crafts project.

“You’re very bored, aren’t you?” The Doctor asked.

“I’ve been here so long I’ve started wondering about why exactly they call such a dazzling array of foods ‘pudding.’ I have regular table at a café. It’s ghastly. If nothing else can, let my submission to routine convince you I’m truly stuck in the most banal paradox since the Gordian Knot. And though I’d rather eat out my own liver than put myself through the indignity of giving ‘Us’,” again the sardonic finger-quotes came out, “a post-mortem, I’ve discovered that England on the cusp of Spring is not all the sonnets would have you believe it to be, that you can’t actually survive long enough to consume your own recently removed liver, and that there is no other conceivable way of exiting This Sceptred Isle-cum-interminable purgatory. Also you’re not probably going to remember any of our lunch-détente tomorrow, which is a comfort.”

“You’ve been working that little speech out a while.”

“Brilliant observation, Doctor. Oh do favor me with another!”

“Had time to read Shakespeare, did you? I’ve been telling you for centuries, the history plays really are worth a look. How’d you find them?” No one could wallow in their moment of triumph like a sow in muck more thoroughly than the Doctor managed to in the space of a few sentences. He didn’t even _need_ to say something apropos about the Master’s meddling finally coming back to him, because it dripped thick as honey from his insulting politeness.

The Master rolled his eyes, drew out his TCE and pointed it at the Doctor, ruining his fun.

Not threatened by the perfunctory show of force, the Doctor looked at the Master. He looked down at the pit. He looked up at his window. He looked at his watch because it was 2:30 pm and he hadn’t eaten and Jo had the day off so there wasn’t going to be any proper tea from the kitchens that didn't taste of foul cocoa and worse chemicals and he couldn’t very well wheedle a cucumber sandwich from the Brigadier, who guarded his tea tray more jealously than Menelaus did Helen.

The Doctor put up his hands and conceded.

“Right. Bessie it is then.”

“Oh, your--” (here the Master mockingly approximated the tiny driving motions the Doctor had previously used to describe his beloved clunker to his childhood friend) “--?”

“I’ll thank you to kindly shut up, give me back my gesticulations and get in my frankly magnificent roadster.” the Doctor bristled. “You’re going to explain everything to me—I know how you like Explaining Everything—over lunch.”

“The Savoy.” The Master put a distracting hand on the Doctor's back and steered him towards the garage where his canary-yellow car waited.

“What?”

“We’re going to lunch at the Savoy. This thing obtains almost respectable speeds. We can be there in good time for formal tea. You can have something hideously sugary, that terrible Peach Melba or whatever they’re calling ice cream wrapped in tacky fruit these days. I want their cucumber sandwiches.”

“But what if I’d wanted to dine somewhere else?” The Doctor raised the garage door, tugged on driving gloves and hopped into the driver’s seat, the Master climbing in beside him.

The Master raised an indulgent eyebrow, holding in an “I’ve been trapped in a horrible time loop for the better part of a month. You want pub food? Tough!” because his mother and Chapter House had raised him well and because he planed to say a multitude of Horrible Things to the Doctor in under an hour anyway. He didn’t want to dull the edge of his centuries _-_ in-the-making tirade with nastiness now.

“Did you, particularly?”

The Doctor pouted childishly. “I might have wanted to. You don’t know.” His lower lip jutted out and his expression had the certain boyish petulance it had once assumed in quite a different context. The Master was reminded too strongly of having ripped cries from those lips, poised just as they were now, on the attractive edge of sulkiness. The Master turned and stared fixedly at his door's handle.

The Doctor started the engine and made for the road to London, driving like a man who was convinced that a vehicular collision was the least of his worries that the moment. He could walk away from that. The Master probably had a TCE up the sleeve of his jacket, and certainly a lot of very justified reproaches at his command, and the Doctor found the latter more terrifying. After a second he addressed his most readily answerable concern.

“Will you share the cucumber sandwiches?”

A deep sigh. “ _Yes,_ Doctor.”

 

***

 

“And _that,_ Doctor,” he waved a perfectly manicured hand in his opponent’s slightly blurry face, “is why you’re a stupid, ungrateful _whore,_ who will never amount to anything, and who should have stayed." The Master slushed another gulp into his patrician mouth. "You bastard.”

                “I think that’s one too many Pimm’s Cups for you. Or about sixteen too many.” The Doctor curled his fingers over the Master’s to pry them off the cocktail glass. He reunited it with its tribe, which spread out across the table in an advancing glassy horde.

                The Master, during the course of the conversation, which had crawled onto the terrace and into the afternoon, had moved through Pimm’s Cups No.s One through Six and then started on the less common variations. Pimm’s in Greece, Pimm’s Pomm, and the highly improbably named Henley Skullfarquar—he was, he told the Doctor back when he was still capable of comprehensible exposition, engaged in a meticulous quest to ascertain the exact gustatory differences between them all.

                “Don’t be reeeediculous,” the Master sneered, messily, “I metabolize alcohol at a rate of—well, _much_ better than humans.”

                The waiter came to clear the table. He was too polite to question the guests on whether the carnage of lemon slices and mint leaves in their individual icy coffins might be a bit much, and too inured to the overindulgence of members of Parliament taking long lunches to care.

                The Doctor watched him, absently wondering how he was going to manage to carry the heavy tray back to the kitchen when he’d stacked it so poorly. Other people’s lack of innate comprehension of spatial relationships always astounded him.

                As soon as the boy had left the Master caught the Doctor’s chin with an unsteady hand. “I’m better. At metabolizing, I mean,” he sulkily insisted, “stop looking at him while we’re doing the Conversation. This could break the time loop! It’s _so important_.” He smacked his palm on the Doctor’s velvet coated arm to make the point, and left it there because it was all warm and soft, and if he ran his hand he could feel the pile of the fabric, and the Doctor’s breath hitched like a skipping record and that was just _fun_.

                His Doctor. Distracting and pleasant. Everything was pleasant! He _loved_ London, the Savoy was _excellent!_

                “I’m drunk,” the Master pronounced, the realization sobering him. “What did you manage to do to me? Did you drug me because you’re _that bad_ at confrontation? Tell me you didn’t put some catalyzing agent in my drink so I would break down the alcohol faster because you were too much of a coward to have a sober discussion about how you ruined our lives and how everything’s your fault.”

                “Er,” the Doctor responded, hand ruffling his hair like it was a beloved pet dog and face matching the strawberries bobbing guiltily in the amber liquid of his own cocktail, “actually it was in those sandwiches we were sharing. Easier to slip it in when fumbling around pretending to be picky. It’s tasteless too, you know.

                “The chemical or your commitment issues? Rassilon, I hate you.” The Master said decisively and took the opportunity to pass out.

 

***

 

The Master woke up in a bed he would wager to guess was upstairs, feeling cogent and nursing a slight headache. The Doctor had taken him to bed and slipped out before he realized what was going on. Again. He didn't even betray originally. The Master wondered if the concierge could bring up anything non-acetylsalicylic, or if humans were so generally immune to aspirin that they wouldn’t keep an alternative on hand.

The Doctor coming out of the bathroom with a glass of water was a surprise.

“I shouldn’t have drugged you.” The Doctor admitted, handing him the water, which he sat up and drank, wincing at the pain the movement caused but staying silent instead of cattily pointing out that on the long list of things the Doctor shouldn’t have done to him, dabbling in recreational pharmaceuticals was the least enraging. He almost respected his pluck.

The Doctor took a big, shaky breath and started in. His eyes were focused on the nondescript end table by the Master's knees.

“I was very young when I left, and the way I went about it—isn’t the way I might now. It wasn’t fair to you. I could have listened to you, but I was-- I was appalled. And too stubborn to work through it. I thought what you did was unforgivable. But I was barely into my second century and I’ve learned a lot more about forgiveness since. And I suppose you should hear me say it. Running away didn’t help anything. I’m sorry. I was such a coward.”

The Doctor moved to stand by the window, slatting his fingers through the blinds and looking down at the city, caught up in its bright summer busyness. In its detailed preciousness, from so far above, it seemed a Fabergé miniature of London, more ideal than should have been possible. He paused, not really seeing it, and soldiered on.

“But I can’t be what you want me to be." The Doctor's voice had such a far-off quality it seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel. "I don’t want to control the universe, I only want to live in it. And I don’t think you have to have mastery over others to be free.” He turned back to the Master and really met his eyes, for the first time all day, like he believed there was some possibility of connection.

“So I guess you should decide what you want. I’m not packaging myself as some bleak opportunity cost—but for lack of a better metaphor," he grinned self-depreciatingly for an instant before it faded, "if you could build a house in which we could both live, I’d do it. I’d want that. I never stopped wanting that.” The Doctor moved to him and kissed his temple, as tentatively as when they had been children.

“You’re the smartest person I know, and if you can’t think of something there’s not much hope.” He straightened and smiled ironically. “See you tomorrow, then. Sleep it off, would you? It’ll smart less.” And he left the Master to nurse his head and scoff at the Doctor’s over-simplistic reduction of a system as complex as the two of them, and, without admitting to himself he was working on it with the dedication Michelangelo put to interior decorating, to try to come up with something.

 

***

 

                The Doctor opened his bedroom door three days later and almost squished the tiny, shriveled corpse of what looked to be an Eternal. How the Master managed that, he didn’t really want to know. The cat like gesture of leaving it at his lintel might have been endearing if it weren’t so disturbing. A little note was attached. He had to tug it off with a toe before he picked it up—under no circumstances was he touching a dead Eternal first thing in the morning. He could recognize the circles as well as his own.

 

 

“ _It's not them meddling, then. Did you know you could pinch a pin-prick through the void and pull them through from outside of time while trapped in a fixed paradox? Bet that smarts. Fascinating in a useless sort of way._

 

_Still not a builder. Not even an architect. Possibly am also fascinating/useless. Ha. You won’t remember I was self-effacing. Good. Bringing me to the point: you could put in a little effort at coming up with something too. Needing the situation explained to you every time’s an awfully convenient excuse for lazy thinking._

 

_\--M”_

 

. The very question of whether something from outside of time killed in a paradox would remain dead the next day, or how it even had physical tissue to compress, being from a non-place without the causality the creation of organic material typically implied, made his head spin. The question of how the Master had broken into his locked TARDIS to drop his awkward present off and why he hadn’t stuck around to further annoy him had its own unresolved complexities. The Master was obviously going more than a little stir-crazy. Well. Stir-crazier.

The Doctor sighed, put on lab gloves, scooped the thing up and disposed of it in a hazardous waste container in the attic of his TARDIS, in the empty corner where it couldn’t touch anything volatile. He was beginning to wonder whether setting up a paradox and pretending he had no idea what was going on was worth the nausea he felt from being temporally compromised, the tiny corpses and the intended beneficiary's biting, accurate drunken recriminations.

But as he and the Master had been going on like this for centuries with only a mounting death toll and a cavernous mutual loneliness to show for it, it seemed bringing things to their grueling conclusion was the best course for the universe and their personal lives. And he had a responsibility to the universe he didn't hesitate to recognize, and one to the Master he only admitted to himself.

The Master had to stop coming around and threatening all humanity. The Doctor had to get off this planet before he went native and signed a mortgage in a fugue. And they both had to stop the ludicrous pining, complete with Freudian dreams about earthquakes with super-sized Masters leering down at him and random, bungled ‘please come dominate all life with me’ proposals that were only rivaled in their complete inappropriateness and earnest depth of feeling by men in Austen novels. They were much too old for this sort of nonsense. A nice totemic-selective paradox had seemed like such a simple solution a month ago.

 

 

***

 

 

The Doctor wasn’t surprised to find the Master in an armchair in the library of his TARDIS, though his decision to peruse the Doctor’s extensive Agatha Christie collection did come rather out of left field.

“Shouldn’t you be plotting something?”

“Shouldn’t she?” The Master countered, holding up _Postern of Fate_. “Why have Tommy and Tuppence given up blackmailing and espionage? Their cosmopolitan life of deceit was certainly more interesting than retiring to the country.”

“That was all in _Partners in Crime_. They got a good offer to run the International Detective Agency. And Tuppence got pregnant and had to take a less active role in spy work. They’re older in _Postern,_ settled. Some people like to become more reasonable as they age. Heaven knows why.”

“See, this is what domesticity does to people. There you are, involved in ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment,’ and suddenly you’re blindsided by odious, limited bourgeois morality and living in a village in Northern England and keeping a dog. And badly written!”

“You’re in my TARDIS to complain about the decline of Christie as a novelist in her later years?”

“Among other things.” The Master put the book on the end table and steepled his fingers. “Sit down.”

“I certainly will not,” the Doctor bristled at being told what to do on his own ship, “You haven’t even given an account of yourself yet. Or did your library card expire? If you'd like to make use of any other of my amenities, the laundry's right past the link to the Eye of Harmony. You can't miss it.”

“As a matter of fact, tempting though your spin cycle may be, I have a proposition for you. You could at least hear me out. As you yourself admitted a few days ago, though you won’t remember having done, you owe it to me to listen. ‘Running away doesn’t help anything,’ apparently. So you could be a coward again, because that’s an awfully comfortable position for you, and it has all the ease of familiarity. Or,” he gestured to the room’s other chair, right across a tiny table from his own, “you could sit down, Doctor.”

Glaring, the Doctor occupied the settee like a disgruntled one-man army.

“That’s better,” the Master grinned smugly, “So. You don’t want to reign benevolently over some planet, making life for its inhabitants as comfortable as possible? I couldn’t give you a world you’d be happy on?”

“What?” The Doctor blinked. “No, no I don’t want a planet. Don’t tell me you’ve gone and conquered any poor system. The High Council will have your regenerations for it.”

“I can’t conquer so much as the next piddling Ice Warrior colony over at the moment for reasons I shan’t be bothered to explain to you again. Still, it’s a pity. You’re making a poor consort, Doctor. But I didn’t think you’d agree to that one. If I’m honest I’d get bored of a tin-pot despotate—tiring little things. And we’re not going back to Gallifrey, not even if we clear our names, unless we’re offered an opportunity to do seize control of the system, or we have an excellent opportunity to steal something intriguing they’re not getting proper use out of anyway.”

“I hadn’t really any intention of crawling back home, but what is all this about?”

The Master ignored him completely. “I’ve a syllogism for you.”

“Oh lucky me. Do tell,” the Doctor said dryly.

“Major Premise,” the Master ticked it off on a finger, “Learning the nature of things, seeing the universe, interfering in events where possible or desirable to create more favorable outcomes: all of these are forms of establishing a relationship of secure intellectual and practical dominion over the known world. That relationship should here be defined as mastery. Minor premise: you crave knowledge and experience, and change tending towards betterment in the world. You’d consider a life not spent in pursuit of that a wasted one. Yes?” He gave the Doctor a patient glare over his two raised digits.

“True,” the Doctor admits.

“Conclusion: we want the same things. I have a TARDIS full of pilfered data that has the potential to satisfy your curiosity. We can use it as a sort of guidebook- there’s so _much_ in the Matrix, so many possibilities. I could fix your clouded mind like that," he snapped his fingers. "I may be capable of learning to content myself with a more academic form of mastery. And unswerving possession of you, naturally. I flatter myself there are few things I'm not capable of, if the prize is appealing enough.

"We’ll decide what constitutes positive change on a case-by-case basis rather than hiding behind abstract ideology and moaning that we’re incompatible, when we probably agree more often than we don’t. We’ll bicker at each other until we come to some general agreements. You'll be making some serious compromises. Don't accept without acknowledging that.

“I’ll try not to kill anyone I don’t have to. You won’t ever, _ever_ leave me like that again, or I swear I’ll hunt you down and really put some effort into killing you, none of this ridiculous hedging so it doesn’t _quite_ come to that.” It was not, the Master admitted, the most well-backed threat he'd ever made, but it was what he had to work with.

He leaned forward.

“Equitable, Doctor?”

“It does sound fair. Somewhere in there we might want to consider forgiving each other for this whole little tragedy.” The Doctor leaned forward himself so that their faces almost touched.

“Is that a yes or a no? I hate to linger on trivialities, only you haven’t explicitly said.” The Master smirked because the Doctor’s body language was infinitely informative, and he angled his head, waiting for the Doctor to give the last inch.

“More of a universal affirmative,” the Doctor teased, dipping to kiss him for the first time in centuries. It was different than he remembered, tasted more like cigar smoke than his nostalgia would have flavored it. It was no less of a homecoming.

“Oh!” he broke off, “In the interest of full-disclosure and starting our fresh attempt at this out properly, I should tell you, the paradox is my fault--”

“Doctor--”

“And I know you’ve been put to a good deal of trouble but it was imperative that we work this out, and I did miss you, more than you can know, a good deal more than I would have imagined I could back when I left--”

“Doctor--”

“You’re pretty manipulative yourself, so you can only afford a certain amount of righteous indignation. This was certainly better than you trying to off me, and I don’t think--”

“ _Doctor._ ” The Master grabbed his face in both hands. “Must you always have the last word? Just shut up for once, would you?” The Doctor flailed under a kiss that demanded him, explored him, reminded him and in a way he hadn't thought possible at his age, having seen and done so much that his personality was set firm, created him afresh.

“You’re not taking it hard, then?” That was a relief, he’d expected full histrionics about being manipulated and colossal resentment over loosing control.

“Oh I’m furious because this is just the type of thing you’d pull, and you’re going to owe me for this one for at least the next subjective decade, and Omega help you if you beg off with a headache. But I can be annoyed after I deal with this,” and the Doctor was pressed down into the settee with explicit intent, and the hands he’d missed were working at his dandyish clothes, which seem to him for the first time to be inconveniently elaborate, “and I can channel my anger into something more productive. As I’m sure you remember.”

The Doctor did recall, and the Master smirked at the flush attempting to creep across his face. “So do I get out of the paradox now?" the Master asked, coy, "Or am I supposed to do anything additional? Nothing you need seen to, is there?” His hands were making a slow sliding descent under the fabric now, just to ascertain for themselves what might need his attention.

                “I’d tell you you’re supposed to be very good, but you never do anything you’re supposed to.” And the Doctor’s eyes went wide, and he buried his face in the crook of the Master’s neck, because he wasn’t used to being touched, certainly not by someone who knew him so well. It was astonishing how this felt like a wholly separate act from being with anyone else. He’d forgotten just _how_ different it was with him, how could he ever have forgotten something so fundamental? But he knew. It had ached too much and the Doctor had put it out of his mind, tucked it away lest it gnaw at him like canker.

                He didn’t have to be afraid now. There was no need to run anymore.

                “Neither do you,” the Master chuckled, “But I suppose we could try to, just this once.”


End file.
